


bellezza

by pendules



Category: Football RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-04
Updated: 2011-05-04
Packaged: 2017-10-19 00:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/194879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pendules/pseuds/pendules





	bellezza

i.

Words whispered against foreheads and cheeks (in Italy, they kiss on cheeks) and through detached media (across continents).

 _you are beautiful_ ( _i'm sorry_ )

 _as are you_ ( _i understand_ )

 _would we still be, if i left?_ ( _i—_ )

 

(there are millions of ways to say beauty and maybe you've never handled any of them well.)

 

( _—love you_ )

 

ii.

Sheva is beautiful in cold, steely accents and long, grey coats and pale features. Light hair, and translucent eyes. Angular cheekbone and jaw structure; that slightly aristocratic poise and way of carrying himself and talking. Thin, pouted lips and that deceptive way of looking at someone. Seductive, but dangerous. Sheva is beautiful in age.

In experience.

 

Kakà is beautiful in youthful privilege and dark eyes. Warm, mellow voice in an equally tender language. The soft, dark, thick hair of a boy curling over ears (ears that will hear and purge a man's words of its offense) and tickling the skin on the back of his neck. Smiles that are purely naїve (and are almost enough to want one to also be naїve, so as to enjoy them). Kakà comes to Italy, a twenty-year-old child.

He is beautiful in innocence.

 

He appears to Sheva, dressed in sleek black, looking nervous and (happy) expectant too.

The first few buttons of his shirt are open, exposing the silky, tan, luminescent, (contradictory against Sheva's, clashing horribly) skin and. Sheva undresses him, carefully, kisses his neck, pale lips making marks on the darker canvas.

Kakà laughs, giggles like (the child he isn't anymore) anything. Sheva doesn't.

(that is his beauty; this is yours)

 

iii.

The speak Italian and it is like, almost, simply. Fusion. The language is ancient, like history, or like memories. Memories that have faded into the grey left behind, across (foreign) familiar, vestige-ridden lands. Like a plague. It is colossal in structure, personal in its tangibility and lifelike in its (beauty) eloquence.

It is young, still, too. When Kakà thinks _sol_ he thinks of (Roman gods) Brazil and beaches and football on uneven, overgrown, fluorescent grass. Brazil is young, still, vibrant and alive. The earth is rich and fertile and rain falls on and refreshes the seas and rivers. He thinks of ten years before when he was happy.

(He thinks about how children who are happy have the false impression that so is the rest of the world. And as adults, if they are happy, it makes them feel guilty to do so. This is the major difference: youth vs. age. And this is why everyone deserves a proper, sheltered childhood. And maybe it is somewhat cruel to instill untruthful delusions into the young, to lie to children but the real world is even more so.

Sheva, Sheva never had that. Whether this makes it easier or difficult now, Kakà doesn't know. Because he may have loved Brazil and always will but with Sheva it seems different. (Maybe if it was the same he wouldn't be Sheva today, and Kakà would not think, know, feel as he did.)

What he does know is this: Kakà came to Italy, a child. There he met a man. A man who was never a child. And now the child is a man as well.)

So, in this way, Italy serves to bridge the gap. The city is old; the sun is young. The football, the club is historical; the sensation of a ball under boots or hitting a net is new, every time. Sheva comes from the cold and Kakà comes from the warm. The meet in between (the mountains to the north, the sea to the south).

(In the end, though, the cold wins.)

 

iv.

Sheva leaves with his beauty intact. Kakà is left with none.

 

v.

He thinks, later on, holds Caroline's hand in his and kisses it and wonders, what is beauty.

Maybe, it's this. Gazing into eyes and seeing your own reflected in them and knowing, understanding something; knowing that those eyes were understanding you as well.

Maybe, it's like a story. The ones Shakespeare used to tell, or the ones that the poets, writers and artists of the Renaissance (here, in Italy, he feels it more, of course) showed to the world. Stories that went off track, took a life of their own, the ones that hurt and stung, the tragedies. Forbidden love.

When he thinks of Sheva he doesn't think of beauty. He thinks of sadness, emptiness.

Then he muses that beauty is duality, and not only, just happiness but. What Sheva is: quiet and brooding and—

He wonders when he started thinking so much, and there used to be a time when he accepted everything. (Sadly, gone, now.) When he thought of everything as God's plan. (And Kakà does believe in God. Yes, he does.) Sheva, of course, presented some problem in this logic. Kakà denied it. He said, to himself, _this is the love God had in plan for me, this is what I've been waiting for._ And not: _this is me spiting God._

If beauty is indeed duality then. Then Sheva is the completeness of it.

 

vi.

Sheva sits, in London. Sheva thinks, writes a story in his head. It isn't a love story. It's a story of—

Roman mythology. Apollo, the god of the sun ( _sol_ ) and poetry and song.

And Mars, the god of... ( _remembers_ ) war.

Gods are immortal. Old and new. Eternal. They cause chaos on earth. Cause mortals to turn on each other.

No, it's not a love story. It's a story of war. (Stories are beautiful.)

He traces his fingertips across the wooden table-top, sketches the contours of a face, golden (divine).

 

vii.

Kakà looks it up in both Portuguese and Italian dictionaries. He tears a page out of an English one and thinks of putting it in an envelope, writing a name on the back, addressing, posting it. Feels like tearing a page out of the Bible instead.

 _ **beauty** (n)_

 _the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations (as shape, color, sound, etc.), a meaningful design or pattern, or something else (as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest)._ [¹](http://www.dictionary.com)

 

viii.

Sheva has a definition of his own.

 

( _—the laughter of children, black and red, innocence, love, heartbreak(?)—_ )

 

Kakà. (Or what you took away from him.)

 

ix.

Kakà, Kakà sits on the grass and composes a list.

 _God._ The face of God must be beautiful.

 _Brazil._ The utter cleanness of it. Though, it isn't, not really.

 _Italy._

 _Football._ Or what it was.

He remembers, he remembers two years before and—

 _the skyline in Istanbul._ (Heartbreak can be beautiful.)

sunsets and the smell of old churches and the curve of Caroline's neck and.

 _Sheva's soul._ What he felt in his kisses and his touch. What he showed in the only way he knew how. He thought all he was doing was robbing Kakà (like the world robbed him) but he didn't, not really.

In Italy, they were whole, together. Now they are apart. But they stained each other enough to be as one, still.

 

x.

Kakà gets a phone call, the next day.

 _Stop looking for it and it will find you._

 _It already has._

 

( _I know, but I'm not coming back._ )

( _I know, but I don't need you to._ )


End file.
